Huh? The Dutch pride themselves on the quantity and quality of their farmland: about 50% of the country is devoted to arable land and permanent pasture. And that’s a pretty impressive figure, given the Netherlands’ extremely high population density.
Admittedly, some of that land is only relatively recently reclaimed from the sea floor, and the foundations of the Dutch fortunes in the seventeenth century were more mercantile than agricultural. But that doesn’t mean that the Netherlands weren’t fairly well blessed in the arable-land department.
Switzerland is admittedly not as lucky in that regard, but they still have 38% of their territory devoted to arable land and permanent pasture combined, which isn’t bad considering how much of the rest is uncultivable mountain.
Egypt’s arable land, on the other hand, is a paltry 2%, which moreover is subject to much harsher droughts, flooding, windstorms, etc., than Switzerland or the Netherlands experience.
Even Iceland, though it admittedly has less than 1% arable land, uses a non-trivial 23% of the total as permanent pasture.
I agree that there is not necessarily a connection between usable farmland and wealth in modern societies, but I think you underestimate the extent to which western European nations have enjoyed the benefits of fertile territory for producing crops and livestock.
It is not an undifferentiated mass, but it is certainly a mass clumped toward the incapacity half of rankings by nation. Botswana is charitably described as a success with the parenthetic modifier “for a subsaharan African nation.”
The difference between Botswana and DR Congo is the difference between crummy and horrible in terms of the OPs question re investment opportunities and the prospect of either nation becoming a China-like “manufacturing juggernaut.”
But hey, it’s your money if you want to invest there.
I hope I am wrong but I will be startled if Botswana becomes a manufacturing juggernaut in, say, the next 50 years. And it is your best candidate subsaharan non SA nation, with which opinion I agree.
But cities tend to be richer than rural areas pretty much everywhere in the world, and Hong Kong and Singapore are just cities- no rural areas to pull the averages down. It’s not really fair to compare a city or a city-state to a country with rural and urban areas.
They do produce these people. Problem is, if you’re a smart, capable person living in sub-Saharan Africa, there are other countries out there with better living conditions that also want smart, capable people. Relatively few of those people will stay and accept poor living conditions for themselves and their families, and who can blame them?
The other problem is, they probably produce fewer of these people per capita than other parts of the world, because of poverty. Most people who are capable of running factories and infrastructure don’t start out as poor as many people are in sub-Saharan Africa. If Bill Gates had been born in sub-Saharan Africa, he might not have had the access to computer and other resources he would need to get an education and found Microsoft- instead, he would have had to spend his time doing subsistence farming or some other low-paid, unskilled job to feed himself and his family. It’s not easy to break a cycle of poverty, either for an individual or for a nation.
I was going to type, I’ll concede that there are more Dutch farmers than I thought, if you’ll concede that that has nothing to do with Dutch wealth, but then I clicked on your link, and read that:
25% of the Netherlands is arable land,
3% is used for crops,
and 50% is reclaimed from the sea,
Hong Kong was almost a barren rock before the British came and took it over. It was used as their trading hub for East Asia, most of the trade coming through that area went through Hong Kong.
Not entirely sure what South Korea has going for it. Though you can contrast that with the North.
A ton of money poured into it by Capitalists seeking to maintain a foothold in China when Chiang Kai Shek removed himself to Taiwan.
What was the nature of Singapore as a city before colonialism? Isn’t its history similar to Hong Kong, and isn’t a lot of Singapore’s prosperity relatively recent?
Egypt is doing better and is more stable than most of Africa.
Israel cares about its people, Saudi Kleptocrats do not. Also, Jews have been for thousands of years been extremely well connected to the Western Power elite, it was very easy for them to setup a western style system that the west could easily do business with.
Quite simply Roman colonialism made Europe what it is today. One of the problems with modern colonialism is that they didn’t go the distance that the Romans did. The Eastern and Western churches took over the Roman bureaucracy and maintained it. All roads lead to Rome as they say. Those roads were valuable infrastructure. The maintenance of a common aristocratic race in Europe helped keep a workable cultural hegemony throughout Europe, even though the individual countries had their own system. For many years everyone in the aristocracy spoke Latin, then everyone spoke French, and now everyone speaks English.
The Indians I think are the best example. What set India apart from Africa? One thing I have heard about recently was one man’s obsessive effort to map India.
This is why the most compelling answer to me is just that their culture was evolving in a distinctly non-western way. I do believe the lack of good roads was mentioned in passing in one of the posts above. This is a cornerstone of civilization. A road however is not just rocks pounded into the dirt, but also the cities it connects, and the trade routes that develop between cultures over centuries and millenia. A lot of the cultures that were better able to adapt to a western system had some things in common with the western paradigm. A culture of Law from what I understand helped Confucian China and Feudal Japan adapt.
You can’t simply blame colonialism for the problems, but neither can you just ignore its impact.
It depends on the city, and the part of the world. In many parts of the US, for example, particularly in the northeast, the cities are poorer than the rest of the country.
The per capita income of Detroit, according to Wikipedia, is $14,717. Chicago - $20,175. St. Louis - $18,108.
Those numbers are all less than half of the number Wiki gives for the country as a whole.
The Chinese are moving in on africa-they are financing ports, dams, roads, and oil wells, pipelines. they offer excellent interest rates, and terms-the only catch is:
-all of the infrastructure projects are built with imported Chinese labor 9so African-owned compamies are shut out)
-the projects are paid for with exports of raw materials 9lumber, oil, ores, etc.0-African-owned companies are shut out
-the Chinese get to export finished goods to their client states-so local manufacturers are driven out of business
So, is China reviving the old colonial system of the 1890’s? Will Africa wind up poorer for it?
The other thing is, the Chinese are not so squeamish about paying large bribes to get oil and mineral contracts. It’s actually illegal for U.S. companies to do so. As some have observed, this makes China’s business dealings with Africa a two-edged sword – good in that they’re bringing in money, bad in that they’re undercutting good governance.
I think what you’ll see (or have already seen) is a split between the elites and the masses on the subject of the Chinese. In Zimbabwe, apparently, there is considerable outrage among the people that Chinese peddlers have, with the connivance of Mugabe, displaced indigenous traders.
As my children have learned, the flip side of independence is living with bad decisions that you decided you were responsible enough to make. Governmental bribes on a large scale need a briber, a bribee and a political climate in which the culture of corruption is tolerated.
If the Chinese are really going after African nations it’s not going to be a fair fight.
I don’t know about that. The Indians in Uganda seemed to have the whip hand, until what’s-his-name decided to kick them out. Any tiny minority will be susceptible to mob violence, particularly if they’re perceived as having an unfair advantage. On the other hand, if China decides to “intervene” in one of these situations, it could cause a full-bore international crisis.
China doesn’t care about human rights in the countries where it does business. This is an issue because it’s hard to pressure the Sudan on Darfur due to China’s noncompliance since they want Sudanese oil. They are not interested in governing these nations, so that separates them from European colonialists.
Also, when China sells goods to African nations it sells the lowest quality goods, the highest quality goods going to the richer nations. The Africans get the dregs. I read an article a while back about a fleet of buses sold to Zimbabwe that won’t even run.
It is possible that Africans will revolt against the Chinese, and depending on the dependence upon the resource from that nation China may just send troops to crush the resistance outright, or supply arms to the regime willing to do it for them.
Africa is going to get the short end of the stick for quite some time.
One thing that occurs to me is that the links between Africa and its previous colonial masters continue to hurt Africa, in that they facilitate brain drain. It sort of helps the Chinese that no one else speaks their language, so going abroad for them means leaving their linguistic comfort zone. But if you look at a country like Nigeria (or even India), the level of English is good, and there’s some familiarity with Britain, and by extension, the Western world. I see figures that say, for example, there are about 3,500 Nigerian physicians in the U.S. There are likely to be just as many in Britain. I’m sure there’s a similar story with engineers, IT people, scientists. The path of least resistance for highly skilled people is simply to leave.
I don’t understand how you managed to get that out of the article I linked to. What I was talking about was the use of the current land area of the Netherlands (of which about 50% has been reclaimed from the sea over the past few centuries, most of it over the past few decades). About that land use, the source says very clearly:
So 50% of the total land in the Netherlands is devoted to arable land and permanent pastures, just as I said.
Maybe what confused you was the difference between “arable land” and “permanent crops”. “Arable land” is agricultural land on which crops are grown, usually ones that are harvested and replanted after every harvest. “Permanent crops”, on the other hand, are things like long-lived fruit trees and vines where a crop is harvested every growing season but not replanted.
So in fact, the total agricultural land (counting crops and livestock both) in the Netherlands is 53% of the total land area of the Netherlands, not just 50%. In short, yes, there are more farmers in the Netherlands than you thought.
(I lived in the Netherlands for a couple of years, and I too was surprised to see what a heavily agricultural country it is. They grow a surprisingly large amount of vegetables and fruits, besides the ever-present floriculture and widespread dairy farming. You can’t get five minutes outside of a Dutch city without seeing cows.)
Did you even read the information that I quoted about Botswana? Specifically,
No, Botswana is not a first-world country or a manufacturing juggernaut. But it is far from being merely “the best of the worst”, either.
For a subsaharan African nation, it is an extraordinary success. For a developing nation considered against other developing nations elsewhere in the world, it is still reasonably successful, certainly much better than “crummy”.
Why should we? AFAICT, most of the geographical and economic information from the Wiki pages that we’ve been citing here comes from quite reliable sources such as US State Department reports and the CIA World Factbook. Are you specifically disagreeing with any of the factual assertions cited here?
